AUSTIN, Texas--What I did, I suppose, could be seen as the transportation equivalent of Messin' with Sasquatch. I'd rather think of it as experimentation.
You're welcome, Google.
I live in Mueller, Texas. And since July, so have several of the search engine giant's self-driving Lexus SUVs, the ones with a metal rack over the cab carrying electronic gizmos to sense the road environment. They have been ubiquitous in the neighborhood, toodling around oh so cautiously.
They move like there's a student driver at the wheel, a particularly obedient and diligent pupil. A front-row, heavy note-taking, eager-to-please student. Not that there's anything wrong with that. In my other role as an adjunct journalism professor, I love such people.
On the road, however ...
The Google cars come to that full and complete stop you always hear about when they arrive at a stop sign (imagine that), then pull out ve-e-e-r-r-y slowly. The cars always go at or below the speed limit, and seem to get spooked at the hint of any incursion into the street--by a pedestrian or dog or whatever--quickly braking in anticipation of a problem. Safety first, second and last.
I'll be honest. Your columnist, perpetually in a hurry and what some might call an aggressive driver--I prefer "confident"--finds the dang things frustrating when I'm behind one. I want to tell the machine to get its rear bumper in gear and move on down the road. In fact, I believe I've said something to that effect a couple of times, but I don't believe Google has equipped the cars with ears.
So my reaction to them likely explains, if not necessarily justifies, what happened recently.
I was almost home, heading east on Zach Scott Street, when I saw the Google vehicle north on Camacho Street at the stop sign, waiting to turn left onto Zach. I was about 75 yards away, distant enough that most drivers would have gone ahead and made the turn ahead of me. I'm sure I would have.
Not Prudence Google. She sat there, her idle human passenger in the driver's seat, waiting for me. I have to wonder if the driver was talking to the car, urging it to show a little verve. But no. Stillness.
That's when the devil got into me. I pulled to a stop mid-block, about 100 feet short of Camacho. There was no one behind me, so I wasn't holding up traffic. But I was doing something irrational, in road terms, behaving in a way that I feel quite sure Google programmers wouldn't necessarily have anticipated.
Up ahead, electronic confusion reigned. The Google car, after a couple of seconds, started to pull out. Then it stopped. Then it moved again, then stopped again. Mind blown.
We were in something of a standoff, me and the computer.
Finally, convinced that for whatever reason I had parked in the middle of a perfectly good thoroughfare, the Google car went ahead and turned. I don't know if the human driver physically overrode it--Jennifer Haroon, director of Google's autonomous car division, told me the driver does have that capability. And I was too far away and on the wrong side (to the driver's right) to see whether he or she favored me with a gesture. The car itself, along with lacking ears, has no fingers.
If this had been a beef jerky commercial, I suppose at that point a piano would have fallen on my car or a semi would have blasted my Mazda into oblivion. As it was, I just drove on home feeling amused at my gambit, but also slightly abashed to have given in to my inner fifth-grader.
The episode, along with all that pokey driving by the Googlemobiles, does make me wonder once again about how the cars--and autonomous cars by other makers sure to follow--will deal with the infinite variety of circumstances out on the road.
What about tailgaters? If the autonomous car is running at the speed limit on a two-lane street, like most residential roads, and then finds someone in a hurry riding its rear bumper, what will it do? I assume speeding up, like some of us would do, isn't an option under its programming protocols. And continuing as is, allowing the tailgating to continue, would be unsafe. Will it know to pull to the right and let the driver-in-a-hurry pass?
Or how will it handle a crowded convenience store parking lot, one with multiple pumps and people doing all manner of erratic maneuvers? What about at a McDonald's drive-through line where people approach from two directions and drivers tend to take a first-you-then-me approach? Will the self-driving car rudely fail to defer?
The iterations of this sort of thing are endless.
As for my teasing of the Google car, I'm not defending it or recommending it. But I'm also not sure I won't do it again. That fifth-grader is still in there.
And that obedient student running the autonomous car, and the army of programmers in Googleville telling it how to react? Consider it free education.
Editorial on 09/20/2015